Sex Differences in Verbal and Visual-Spatial Tasks under Different Hemispheric Visual-Field Presentation Conditions

• Published in: Perceptual and motor skills Vol. 110; no. 2; pp. 396 - 410
• Main Authors: Boyle, Gregory J., Furedy, John J., Neumann, David. L., Westbury, H. Rae
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.04.2010; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Attention; Cognitive ability; Discrimination Learning; Dominance, Cerebral; Female; Gender differences; Humans; Individuality; Intelligence; Male; Orientation; Problem Solving; Psychomotor Performance; Reaction Time; Reading; Sex Characteristics; Verbal communication; Visual Fields; Visual task performance; Young Adult; Australia
• ISSN: 0031-5125; 1558-688X
• DOI: 10.2466/pms.110.2.396-410

This paper reports sex differences in cognitive task performance that emerged when 39 Australian university undergraduates (19 men, 20 women) were asked to solve verbal (lexical) and visual-spatial cognitive matching tasks which varied in difficulty and visual field of presentation. Sex significantly interacted with task type, task difficulty, laterality, and changes in performance across trials. The results revealed that the significant individual-differences' variable of sex does not always emerge as a significant main effect, but instead in terms of significant interactions with other variables manipulated experimentally. Our results show that sex differences must be taken into account when conducting experiments into human cognitive-task performance.